Page 329 - ANNA KARENINA

Anna Karenina

‘Happiness!’ she said with horror and loathing and her
horror unconsciously infected him. ‘For pity’s sake, not a
word, not a word more.’
She rose quickly and moved away from him.

‘Not a word more,’ she repeated, and with a look of
chill despair, incomprehensible to him, she parted from
him. She felt that at that moment she could not put into
words the sense of shame, of rapture, and of horror at this
stepping into a new life, and she did not want to speak of
it, to vulgarize this feeling by inappropriate words. But
later too, and the next day and the third day, she still
found no words in which she could express the
complexity of her feelings; indeed, she could not even find
thoughts in which she could clearly think out all that was
in her soul.
She said to herself: ‘No, just now I can’t think of it,
later on, when I am calmer.’ But this calm for thought
never came; every time the thought rose of what she had
done and what would happen to her, and what she ought
to do, a horror came over her and she drove those
thoughts away.
‘Later, later,’ she said—‘when I am calmer.’
But in dreams, when she had no control over her
thoughts, her position presented itself to her in all its

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